Vietnam: thoughts on lesson ideas

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I didn't study anything about the war in Vietnam until college. Like all too many American students, my high school history education stopped abruptly with V-J day.

But my first exposure to Vietnam was in middle school, when part way through the school year, we got a new student in class.  Our teachers introduced him and explained that he was from Vietnam. We didn't know where that was, and he couldn't tell us much, because he didn't speak much English. Despite his poor grasp of English, he seemed to understand all too clearly that at least some kids made fun of his odd-sounding foreign name and funny accent. 

One day his mother came to class as a guest speaker. She spoke English just fine. And she told us about the family's harrowing experiences escaping from Vietnam after the war, and their eventual journey to the United States.  I remember watching some of my classmates--the ones who had teased this boy--squirming uncomfortably in their seats.

Political cartoon by David Levine.

The Vietnam War is like that. It makes us squirm in our seats. Not only is it a story without a happy ending, it has left more than just the scar on Johnson's presidency, as depicted in the famous cartoon on the left. Not even counting--for a moment--the actual casualties of the war, this conflict that lasted over twenty-five years was responsible for an increasing skepticism and cynicism about U.S. foreign policy, distrust of the government in general, and the presidency in particular, from which we have yet to recover.

Funny that the seventies is known the "Me" decade, isn't it? When we think about the Vietnam War that ended in the 1970s, it's all "US, US, US"--pun intended. Our study of the conflict is very much from the American perspective.

That makes some sense. We are, after all, American and teaching American history. But widening our perspective might not be a bad thing to do. For starters, students are often surprised to know that in Vietnam, the conflict is referred to as the "American War."

Try this experiment with your students: have them search on Google the term "Vietnam War Casualties." Of the nine sites that showed up on the first page of Google results when I tried this, only three (Wikipedia was one) included Vietnamese casualties. Or even before that, try Googling "Vietnam." If you do a search on any other country, you will get news, tourist information and the like. You will get that if you enter "Vietnam," too, but you will also a few sites just about the war. That is not true of any other place on earth. Only googling "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" come close.

So I think before we teach anything about Vietnam, we might want to point out this American, war-centric perspective. And share the casualties. From both sides. (Note: this link is a great resource for all things Vietnam War related.)

A few years ago, I stumbled across the book, History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History which I mentioned in an earlier post about the Annexation of the Philippines. There is a chapter on Vietnam that includes excerpts from textbooks from Vietnam, France and Canada. For an excellent online source about the Vietnamese perspective, see this page. It's well worth reading the whole thing, but then scroll down to the part where it mentions the overall key points that are taught in Vietnam. I have excerpted the first point below:

It was a war against American invasion

In Vietnam, the war is called as the “Resistance War Against the United States (to protect the country)” (chien tranh chong My cuu nuoc). It is always taught that the U.S. was another colonist power and imperialist just like the French and that Vietnam is not a civil war but instead a war against American invasion.

This is an important concept for students to grasp and worth introducing at the beginning of your unit. It is complex, and you would probably want to revisit this interpretation as you go through the unit. But it speaks volumes about how differently both sides saw the war. We need to consider the Vietnam War from these different perspectives. Was it a proxy war, a civil war between North and South Vietnam, a colonial war of resistance, an effort to stop the spread of communism? That depends on what side one was on, and there were more than two. (I can feel a new idea for a lesson coming on...."Read each of the quotations below. Which perspective from this list best describes the author's understanding of the war?")

In my next post I will share a few lesson materials on Vietnam, but in the meantime, I will conclude with a few basic points that I think students need up front before they can start critically examining the period.

1. Where is Vietnam? Make sure students can find it on a map. Understanding that it was a nation few Americans could find on a map when we first became involved is key, too. Understanding Vietnam's location in relation to China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines is worthwhile, too.

2. War was never declared, so why do we call it a war?  Remind them: only Congress has the power to declare war, as stated in Article I, section 8, clause 11. You could have a whole lesson on this, and later in your unit students will likely encounter the War Powers Resolution of 1973. But I like to at least mention this at the outset and remind them that the precedent had been set in Korea.

1975 Political Cartoon - this particular copy of this cartoon, 

coincidentally, is the copy owned by President Obama that 

will be displayed in the Obama library. 

3. Vietnam was America's longest war.  Students associate Vietnam with the sixties. Understandably. But make sure they know that while the U.S. first sends troops in 1965 and "advisers" before that, the roots of the conflict in Vietnam begin much earlier. Vietnam was a matter of discussion by Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II. And Ho Chi Minh was at Versailles back in 1919 trying to get an audience with Woodrow Wilson. (FYI, the link is to a the Wall Street Journal's commemoration of World War I. Bookmark this site for your World War I unit--wish I had known about it sooner!) Just like the Civil Rights movement doesn't begin overnight with Brown v. Board, the Vietnam War doesn't start with Kennedy or Johnson.

4. I also like to set up the unit by introducing a few overall, essential questions raised by U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There are many, but the three I like to focus on throughout the unit are below. They are adapted from historian George C. Herring. I post them up on the board and refer back to them as we go.

•  Why such a huge commitment in an area of so little apparent importance? In other words, why did we get involved in Vietnam in the first place? Why did we continue?
• Why, despite an enormous military arsenal and spending $150 billion, did the world's most powerful nation still fail to accomplish its objectives?
• What were the long term consequences of this failed foreign policy for the U.S. government? for public confidence? for later foreign policy? For good measure, either to introduce the unit or conclude it, you could introduce the concept of the Vietnam Syndrome. The cartoon below is useful for that, though pretty challenging. There is a lot of background knowledge students would need to understand it. An easier one, and one of my personal favorites, you can see here. It's by cartoonist Daryl Cagle and dates from March 2003. This is a theme to develop further when you get to the Gulf Wars and --if you make it!--to the present day.

There are a few other good cartoons and a thought-provoking article about Iraq replacing Vietnam in our national psyche which you can see in this article from the Huffington Post.

Cartoon above found here. 

For more on Vietnam see my next post which includes a few things of mine and links to some other great resources. Find that here.

To Lecture, or Not to Lecture: That is the Question

...along with Some Ideas for Teaching the Cold War

To lecture or not to lecture? That is at least one of the big questions out there for history teachers. And one that generated a lot of attention in a recent post titled, "Why do so many HS history teachers lecture so much?", by Grant Wiggins in which he presented research that says history teachers lecture significantly more than their counterparts in other subjects. In fact, there has been so much interest in the topic, that Wiggins had his colleague, Mark Williams, do a guest post published yesterday to follow up on the topic. (In it, Williams describes a gifted teacher not lecturing about Brown v. Board of Education. He also provides useful information about what teachers can do to increase the quantity and quality of "student" vs. teacher talk.)

There were quite a few comments on the initial post (including two from me). The most common explanations center around the content demands of history and the fact that kids don't read their textbooks.

Now, telling kids what is in the textbook that you assigned but assume they didn't read is probably the dumbest reason for a giving a lecture EVER. But yes, I will admit to having done this on occasion in my first years of teaching U.S. history (War of 1812, I'm talking about you). We likely tell ourselves that we are helping the students "synthesize" or "summarize" what they have already read about. And if we are truly doing that, WHILE adding enriching material that we have gleaned from other sources, and including a pertinent quotation or brief excerpt from a primary source, playing a brief piece of music or showing them some intriguing visuals that clarify the information--a photograph, a map, some charts--and stopping intermittently to ask thought-provoking questions....well, that is a different animal.

But still, there are better reasons for giving a lecture than just summing up a topic that is in your textbook. Here are a few:

• when you are presenting something that is not in the textbook, usually a complex topic, an issue of historiography, or something that is just left out (e.g. a lecture introducing the concept of realism and idealism as explained in my previous post). Sometimes I have lectured on complex topics on which I have read scholarly essays or a chapter in a book that I want to present to students. There is a lot of material that you can easily present to students--even middle schoolers-- in a brief lecture after you have read the 20-30 page essay or chapter. A lecture is not the only way to do this, but it is a way to do it that is sometimes useful. The idealism/realism concept I discuss in the post mentioned above is a good example. 
• when you are giving them some biographical background about an important historic figure (like Theodore Roosevelt).
• when you want to tell them an amazing story in some detail.
• when, in the interest of time, you want to give them some background on something so that you can move on to another activity in which they need background.

There are some equally good times when not give a lecture:

• every day
• the Friday before spring break (and other similar times)
• the period right after students have done PARCC testing
• if you are not a good lecturer
• when you are just spitting back info that can be easily gotten elsewhere (i.e. the textbook) or info that can be presented using a more interactive method
• the whole period (lots of research out there about student attention spans fading after 18 minutes, some says less)

As I said above, the other comments in Grant Wiggins' post centered around the significant content burdens in history classes compared to other subjects. I completely agree that the content burdens of history are more onerous than in math or English (not sure about science), but as I have said often throughout this blog, we are responsible for navigating that burden wisely, and not succumbing to it. That requires two key things:

1. judicious selection of what to keep and what to leave out. 
2. making connections so that students will see the forest through trees. (If you haven't yet read the chapter I keep mentioning from James Loewen's Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited about Doing History, now is the time. It's chapter 1, "The Tyranny of Coverage.") And see some of my earlier posts about this topic by searching on this page using the search terms, "syllabus" and "unit planning."

For me, questions of pedagogy--when to lecture, when not to--I find difficult to tease out from questions about content. So, as I promised at the end of yesterday's post on the Cold War, I want to further examine this question about lecturing by describing two additional resources on the Cold War. One is a lecture, one is not. (Do check out yesterday's post...I don't usually publish two posts so close together, so I'm worried that people will miss it.)

The one that is not, ironically, developed from a lecture I used to give. I know, because I found an old overhead (pre-PowerPoint days) that said "Causes of the Cold War" on it and then listed a few reasons. It appeared to be a rather dull lecture that would not be remotely engaging for 8th graders and so, last spring when I introduced the Cold War I took that as a starting point to create a non-lecture lesson. 

Here is the non-lecture Cold War intro lesson:

I described the technique in my recent post about the U.S. and the Holocaust. Click here for an overview of the technique and here for the cards to use on the Cold War. As I deconstruct what went into the creation of this lesson, I took what could be a pretty long and intense college-level or advanced high school level lecture on causes of the cold war and turned it into an outline, and then turned all the pieces of that outline into information that was put onto cards. And then the students have to put it together.  (This sounds odd, but when you take information off of a screen or 8 1/2 X 11" pieces of papers and put them onto cards, preferably laminated and in color, that students can physically manipulate, somehow, students are more engaged in the material. I have no scientific evidence of this, just my observations that it seems to work.)

A few things to note about this. First, if you actually try the lesson, please note that it was designed for fairly high-achieving 8th graders, making it easily adaptable for high schoolers. In retrospect, I think I would edit the cards more for middle schoolers, or at least be aware that they need a lot of help. The lesson took two days. So another point to bring up about lecture and not lecturing is that lecturing is "faster." You could probably "cover" this material in a 30 minute lecture. Or a 1 or 2 day lesson. But we should all note that --as a professor I had once used to say--anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. And how much would our students retain from that 30 minute lecture vs. what they would retain from the non-lecture version I have presented?

Here is an example of a lecture on the Korean War:

As I mentioned earlier, regarding content demands, you have to be judicious. So the point of this lecture was to explain the Korean War in the context of the Cold War. The point was to get students to understand how a civil war in Greece that no one in America knew much about, led to a war in Korea and later in Vietnam and eventually an "interventionist" U.S. foreign policy that we still have today. The point was not to memorize a bunch of facts about the Korean War itself (which is mostly what their textbook did), but to undertand it in the context of the Cold War. I hope that this is a useful example both about better lectures (I'm not saying this is an awesome one), and about handling the related problem of content overload.

So here is the PowerPoint I created. Here is the handout I gave to students that we worked through together during the lecture. Here is a key for the teacher.

A few other things to note...

• While I don't remember how long the lecture was exactly, I do know that it was interrupted often by having students writing, and asking questions that nudged students to "predict" information that would come on the next slide of the accompanying PowerPoint and the worksheet that I gave them to accompany the lecture.

• Be wary of overusing custom animation on PowerPoint. I suspect I am guilty of this on this particular PowerPoint (I've got a few sound effects, including the explosion of an atomic bomb--not sure what came over me. As if I didn't have better ways to spend my time--grading papers, planning the next lesson, etc. instead of obsessing over cutesy special effects that are hardly impressive to the younger generation!) On the other hand, having one point come up at a time on a slide can be effective.

About PowerPoints or Google Presentations or Prezis...

I constantly harp on my methods students and student teachers to remember a few key things about using such presentation tools:

1. think about what you are going to put on the slide (avoid too much text)
2. think about what words are going to come out of your mouth
3. think about if you are going to include a notetaking guide to accompany it, and if so, what you are going to include on that
4. think about whether or not to give students access (through something like Canvas, Edline, Blackboard, or other platform) to the presentation. Or you could print out slides.
5. think about what you want students to write down on paper or on your handout

To conclude, I just want to remind all of us that the point of good teaching is quality student learning. We need to be self-reflective: was our lecture as exciting as we thought it was? Were students really paying attention? And is paying attention enough? Did they engage in the material? Will they retain any of it? And if so, for how long? 'Til the test? Or longer? 

I will end with a favorite quotation of mine by Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own. She writes,

[T]he first duty of a lecturer is to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. 

I hope this doesn't leave you thinking I am holding up the lecture as the paragon of exemplary teaching. But substitute the word "lecturer" above for "teacher." And substitute "hour's discourse" for "class period" and you've got yourself a standard worth striving for.

(Oh dear, ending with a hanging preposition!)

The Cold War Today: Connecting Past and Present

Conveniently, Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea just as I began my unit on the Cold War last spring. While no history teacher wishes for disaster just to make her lessons more meaningful, it does remind me how often the present can be better understood in light of the past. This week's unrest in Baltimore compared to the  1960s, anyone? (More on that in an upcoming post on teaching the Civil Rights movement).

The Cold War "ended" with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dramatic events of 1989 and the early nineties, but....well, the more things change...

And now I'm not just talking about Putin. 

Essentially, the Cold War was a period of friction between two world "systems," the Communist East and the Capitalist/Democratic West. Today, we can clearly see conflict between the West and a different East--the East of Islamism/Islamic Fundamentalism. Since the events of 9/11, I'd argue that the U.S. has been involved in a different Cold War, with a different enemy. But we can see some striking similarities: 

The interplay of religion. Then it was the Judeo-Christian West vs the "Godless" atheism of the Soviets. Today we are described as the infidels by Islamic fundamentalists. The occasional outbreaks of hot war: our involvement in Afghanistan and Iran today, Korea and Vietnam then. The conflicts over resources. And there are others. 

I bring this up as something to keep in mind as you teach about the Cold War. It is easy--alas, I find myself saying this over and over again in this blog--to get bogged down in too much detail. The goal should not be to have students learn facts about the Truman Doctrine, the Berlin airlift, NATO, the Marshall Plan, the fall of China, the Warsaw Pact, containment, McCarthyism, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, HUAC, the U-2 incident, Cuba, Krushchev, Korea, and on and on....oh my! The goal should be

1. to make connections among (some of) the items above 
2. to understand how our values and assumptions about the Soviet Union turned into policy
3. get a sense of how the U.S. acted as one of two major powers in the world and and 
4. understand how the foreign policy of the United States was forever changed in ways that still have an impact today. (See cartoon at right!)
5. and of course we should connect all of this to our past study of foreign policy, especially the concepts of realism and idealism. (See this previous post and this one).

This means that we have to make choices about what we teach and what we leave out. I would encourage you NOT to cut out McCarthyism, though, as this is a way to connect what was going on abroad to the fear and paranoia at home. And it raises important issues about the first amendment which ought to be a recurring topic in U.S. history classes, I think. Why? Two simple reasons: it is one of our fundamental rights as citizens and students like talking about it.

To engage students in that topic, I like to show the first 20 minutes or so (I stop right before the Rosenbergs) of the documentary, Cold War Reds, 1947-1953, by CNN Perspectives. For more info on the video, including some of the criticisms of it, check out this site. I have mixed thoughts about giving students worksheets to go along with films (more on that in another post, I think), but I did choose to use one with this film. The clip is about 20 minutes, so if you devote a class period to it, you have plenty of time to stop it often so students have a chance to take notes and/or you can discuss the question as you go, or afterwards or a little of both. Find that worksheet here. Note that the last question I have on there says, "for tomorrow." That is because I the following day I like to spend on McCarthyism and connecting it to the present.

Years ago, when I taught about McCarthyism, I asked students to think of a more contemporary equivalent to accusing someone of being a communist. Often, they came up with the term, "racist." Their argument was that if a politician or other public figure was accused of saying something racist, that figure was often considered "guilty" immediately and had to "prove" that they weren't really racist, or that the comment was taken out of context. Just like those accused of being communists in the 1950s. I would argue that this is still a great example. But last spring, as I taught in a community that had a significant Muslim population, I was delighted when one of my students brought up the effect 9/11 had on Muslims in the United States. As the only student at the school who wore a headscarf, she had had personal experience with how others viewed her suspiciously and negatively simply because of the headscarf.

McCarthyism also presents the opportunity to make connections to the social conformity of the 1950s (see some of the videos and the interview in the bagtheweb lesson described in my last post), as well as racism, anti-semitism, and today's prejudice against Muslims.

For a nice "hands-on" sort of activity, check out this handout that was given to me years ago from deep in the history department's files (so I have no idea who first created it). I had students edit it directly from Google docs last year, but of course, the old-fashioned paper and pencil method works too. Following the activity, I had students write an ID, defining McCarthyism. I like to teach students early in the year how to do this, as it is a simple writing activity that can be used in class, for homework, or on tests. You can use this handout to do that.

Considering recent changes in our policy toward Cuba, it also makes sense to keep that in your Cold War curriculum. I found some really interesting resources on that last spring. Check 'em out:

• my handy google presentation that lays out the basic facts for background information
• these 3 short video clips about Castro, Krushchev and Kennedy from The Armageddon Letters are engaging for students, short (about 5 min. each) and help humanize this international crisis. I really liked them a lot. So did the students.
• I found the above videos from the Choices Program lesson on the Cuban Missile Crisis. This site has the links to the videos above, as well as suggestions for how to use them.
• I adapted this graphic organizer from the lesson above to add my own touch at the end. Check out my discussion question about the role of personality in shaping history.
• The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) also has a good lesson on the Cuban Missile Crisis. I used the documents they suggested. Check that out here.
• Found some good stuff, too, at the New York Times Learning Blog site. 
• You can put students in groups and assign each one of the following choices outlined to President Kennedy: 1. do nothing, 2. invade Cuba 3. airstrike against the missiles 4. naval blockade around Cuba 5. negotiate. And then they have to come up with reasons to support this choice. Then you can discuss what Kennedy actually did do.
• Analyze the effect the Cuban missile crisis had on JFK and our foreign policy in general using these two speeches of Kennedy's. You can use it at the end of your lesson, or use the first at the beginning and the latter at the end. Very Common Core.

If you're looking for more Cold War materials, check out my next post.